Why not try the same thing for culture and ideas?

A high-profile American cultural delegation is visiting China right now.

The group includes several prominent figures Cellist Yo Yo Ma and author Amy Tan, Filmmaker Joel Coen and Actress Meryl Streep.

The World’s Beijing correspondent Mary Kay Magistad is covering their visit.

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MARCO WERMAN: I’m Marco Werman, and this is The World, a coproduction of the BBC World Service, PRI, and WGBH Boston. Remember ping pong diplomacy? Well, if sports helped improve relations between the US and China in the 1970s, why not try the same thing now with culture and ideas? A high profile American cultural delegation is visiting China right now. The group includes several prominent figures, Cellist Yo Yo Ma and author Amy Tan, filmmaker Joel Coen and actress Meryl Streep. The World’s Beijing correspondent Mary Kay Magistad is covering their visit. Who’s behind this event, Mary Kay, and what is the overall goal?

MARY KAY MAGISTAD: Well, it’s being sponsored by the Asia Society and the Aspen Institute. If there’s one person who really came up with this idea, it’s Orville Shull at the Asia Society. He said, “Look, for most of my career, I’ve been writing, I’ve been putting together policy papers more recently, and it doesn’t matter how smart they are, they land on someone’s desk and no one reads them. They don’t have much impact. I figured let’s try doing something really different. People like coming together around movies, around books, around ideas. Let’s have a festival where we bring a lot of these things together, and people can have fun, and around the edges, they can start talking about other things. Hopefully, this will be a stop toward helping us understand each other better.

WERMAN: You spoke with filmmaker Joel Coen, whose last film, True Grit, was screened during the visit to China, and you had a chance to screen a movie by a Chinese filmmaker Zhang Yimou called A Woman, A Gun, and A Noodle Shop, which is a remake of sorts of Coen’s film, the 1984 thriller, Blood Simple. Tell us about that.

MAGISTAD: Joel Coen was speaking on a panel, and he said that in fact he liked this remake a lot, but he did also have another reaction to it.

JOEL COEN: I think it may have been the single weirdest viewing experience of my life watching it for the first time because there were aspects of it where I thought why did Zhang Yimou even bother to ask us permission to do this, it’s so different. In other parts of it, where I thought, “Oh, okay, there is the story.” Certain parts of it seemed very close of what we were doing. That is a really good example of why this kind of contact is really important because what he was doing with that is exactly what we do all the time. We’re constantly watching things, and it all goes in, and it gets spit back out in some form of influence. What he did was he took whatever he wanted to take from that movie, and he made it completely his own.

WERMAN: Mary Kay, I have to ask you, that’s Joel Coen speaking in English to, presumably, a lot of Chinese in the room. These have to be fairly well-to-do elite Chinese, I’d imagine.

MAGISTAD: Quite a few of the Chinese who came are in some way in the realm of culture. They’re writers, filmmakers, aspiring filmmakers or people who just love film and culture. There were also quite a few Americans in the room as well. The point he was making, which is where does creativity come from, it’s keeping your mind open, it’s being able to connect dots you didn’t ever expect to connect, I think is a very resonate message for a Chinese audience. It’s also an important one because in China, where a lot of information is censored, where people are told they shouldn’t be thinking certain kinds of thoughts, it does tend to limit creativity.

WERMAN: From what you’ve seen, Mary Kay, from this visit, will culture be the thing to improve relations between the US and China?

MAGISTAD: I think it never hurts. Certainly, in terms of the exchange of films and books and other ideas through other means, there’s a lot of interchange already between the US and China. I think one issue for China as it reaches for more soft power, as it likes to refer to it, which is more influence in the world, more of a power of attraction, more of others outside of China wanting to be like China, they see what the US has and they want it. They don’t know how to get there. Part of the reason is the government’s almost trying to do this by fiat. It’s trying to do by saying, “Okay, we will now move to be more creative.” The Americans are coming in this conversation and saying, “Hey, just open up your minds and think about things differently. Think about how else things can be, and interesting things might happen.”

WERMAN: Mary Kay, I have a stargazer question for you. Is Meryl Streep, who is on this visit, is she big in China?

MAGISTAD: Very, very big. In fact, there was a fan club in the audience today, 20 young women who had flown in from all over China. They were wearing identical yellow hoodies that said Meryl Streep across the front, they had their scrapbook, and they had all sorts of memorabilia of Meryl Streep. I think in general, she’s a very well respected actress in China and quite well-known.

WERMAN: What’s her hit movie there?

MAGISTAD: People knew many of her movies. At one point when she was speaking on the panel, she said, “I was in this movie, Out of Africa, and I don’t know if you’ve seen it,” and everyone’s like, “Yes!”

WERMAN: A big growth of applause, standing ovation.

MAGISTAD: Yes, absolutely. There was one really nice moment at an evening performance with Meryl Streep and Yo Yo Ma. Meryl Streep was reading poetry while Yo Yo Ma was playing cello, and at the end, they obviously have great respect for each other, he bowed to her, she bowed to him, he bowed more deeply, she bowed more deeply. He got down on his knees and bowed, and she did the same. Then, she prostrated herself flat on the ground. At which point, he looked around and did the same thing.

WERMAN: Mary Kay Magistad in Beijing. Thank you for speaking with us.

MAGISTAD: Thank you, Marco. It was a pleasure.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

Gauldin has a good record of improving ELL students’ English skills, in marked contrast to many of the schools in neighboring Los Angeles. The situation there is so dire that the the U.S. Department of Education has launched a investigation to determine if if the Los Angeles Unified School District is violating the civil rights of English Language Learners. The feds are also taking a look at Boston schools. (A few months ago, Carol Hills and I discussed Arizona’s decision to penalize ELL teachers whose accents are deemed too foreign. Arizona is still defending its policy, which itself has come under federal scrutiny.)

Also in the podcast, a Creole-speaking Haitian girl newly arrived in New York City enrols in a high school, with help from a community group in Brooklyn. The girl fled Haiti after the earthquake there earlier this year. Like most Haitians, she wants to master the language and stay here permanently. But she only has a U.S. visitor visa. Then it’s back to California as an Arabic immersion program gets underway at FAME a public charter school in Fremont, CA.

Reporter Hana Baba provided us with this nice slideshow of scenes from the school, including the photo (left) of school founder Maram Alaiwat. Not surprisingly, many of the students at this K-10th grade school are of Arab and/or Muslim descent. More surprising is that the school has opened its doors to the FBI. The bureau offers FAME 5th graders the chance to become “junior special agents” .

Finally, the first Zulu-English dictionary in 40 years has just been published in South Africa. Some English speakers already know a few words of Zulu (also known as isiZulu) — words like ubuntu. Zulu has also borrowed from other South African languages such as Afrikaans, and many Zulu words offer their own linguistic takes on apartheid and AIDS. We talk with the publishing manager of Oxford University Press South Africa. Download MP3

South African cartoonist Zapiro

Anchor Marco Werman speaks with The World’s Carol Hills about  a cartoon by South African cartoonist Zapiro that has sparked controversy. The cartoon  depicts the prophet Mohammed lying down on a  therapist’s chair saying: “Other prophets have followers  with a sense of humor!”  Today Zapiro said the cartoon was not meant to be offensive.  “I believe that all religions should be subjected to satire  and that some religious groups should not be able to think  they are above society.”

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This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN:  Muslims in Pakistan this week have not been happy.  We spoke about the controversy yesterday over the Facebook page Everybody Draw Mohammad Day.  The World’s Carol Hills has a follow up to that story.  Carol this new chapter out of South Africa, right?

CAROL HILLS:  Yes sir.  It’s a very famous cartoonist there, Jonathan Shapiro.  He’s known by his nom de plume, or nom de cartoon, Zapiro and he published today in the South African weekly, The Mail and Guardian, it’s take off on the Facebook, you know, Draw a Picture of Mohammad Day and Mohammad is lying on a psychiatrist’s couch.  He’s lying there and he’s saying, “Other prophets have followers with a sense of humor”.  So people have gone nuts about it.

WERMAN:  In South Africa or many places?

HILLS:  There’s been a reaction around the world, but Muslims particularly in South Africa tried to get the Mail and Guardian, tried to prevent them from publishing it.  And they tried a legal maneuver, but it didn’t work.  And people have also then challenged Zapiro, why did you do this?  What happened to the Danish cartoonist?  And he said look, I didn’t do anything intentionally provocative, the goal of this cartoon was not to make fun of Mohammad, he thinks it was sort of an affectionate kind of portrayal of Mohammad as saying geez, why can’t everybody just chill out?  And he also believes that it’s a serious issue of freedom of expression.  He basically told the BBC this morning, I won’t be cowed into silence.

WERMAN:  And Carol, listeners can see that cartoon as well as some others in this week’s slide show that you curated.  Tell us where we can find it.

HILLS:  Yes they can.  You’ll find it at the world dot org slash cartoons.  It is the cartoon, the Mohammad cartoon, by Zapiro and it’s also a selection of some of his other cartoons that have been about religious tensions and sensitivities.

WERMAN:  The World’s Carol Hills thanks for joining us.

HILLS:  Thanks Marco.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

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This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN: It was on this day in 1922 that British archeologist Howard Carter discovered the tomb of Tutenkamen in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings. It was filled with extravagant treasures that made both the pharaoh and the man who discovered his tomb famous. Today Howard Carter’s headquarters was opened as a museum. The BBC’s Yolande Knell took a tour.

TOUR GUIDE: We are in the office of Howard Carter. He used to sit in the office to write his own diary.

YOLANDE KNELL: Conveniently close to the entrance of the Valley of the Kings Howard Carter stayed in this rest house during the difficult years when he was employed by Lord Kanavan, owner of a vast collection of Egyptian artifacts obsessively searching for the burial place of a relatively unknown pharaoh named Tutenkamen. His discovery of the tomb exactly 87 years ago was to make the boy king and the archeologist famous around the world.

TOUR GUIDE: He was the most famous and the most luckiest to find a tomb like Tutenkamen with all the treasures inside almost intact. It is the same story as Tutenkamen, why he’s famous. How about the rest of the kings and queens like Rameses II, Thutmose III, Hatshepsut – they were more important than Tutenkamen. But Tutenkamen he became the most famous because of the treasures inside his tomb.

KNELL: Mustafa Wasari from Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities oversaw the restoration of the house now reopened as a museum. Among the first visitors were cousins of Howard Carter and the great grandson of Lord Kanavan who inherited his title. He says a lot of work went in to the eventual discovery.

LORD KANAVAN: It’s rather forgotten that there were many years here spent working on the West Bank before Tutenkamen – before anyone even heard of Tutenkamen. But they persisted right into the concession in the Valley of the Kings and to be honest it was their last year of work when they found Tutenkamen’s tomb. They really weren’t going to on and spend anymore time after that because money was really running out.

TOUR GUIDE: We are standing now so close to the Tomb of King Tutenkamen.

KNELL: Every day thousands of international visitors come to the Valley of the Kings. It’s a short decent to the underground chamber where Tutenkamen mummy still lies. Although this is the smallest tomb here it remains a big attraction. It was through this doorway that Howard Carter finally made a tiny breach. Peering in he said he could see wonderful things. But those wonderful things over 5,000 objects were destined to stay in Egypt. Many including the golden burial mask are on display at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. Museum director Wafaa el-Saddiq is grateful to early legislation on antiquities.

WAFAA EL-SADDIQ: Thank God because without this law it was in 1991 that collections can’t be divided and at the same time unique objects cannot leave the country. I know that Howard Carter and Lord Kanavan want very much to have some objects or the whole collection even to bring them back to Britain but because of that law we saved Tutenkamen.

[APPLAUSE]

KNELL: New archeological discoveries are still being made across Egypt. But increasingly now Egyptians themselves are responsible. This applause greeted the announcement of several finds by the first all-Egyptian team to carry out excavations in the Valley of the Kings. Salima Ikram who teaches Egyptology at the American University in Cairo says it’s a sign of the times.

SALIMA IKRAM: There are more opportunities for the Egyptians to work and so they are now taking up the work because before that I think frequently they either didn’t have the training or were denied the permission to do this. So this is really sort of the democratization and accessibility for people to learn themselves and teach others about their own history.

KNELL: Egypt’s chief archeologist believes most of the country’s monuments still lie under the sands. With his protégés now searching for several missing royal tombs, there is hope they will lay claim to yet more famous finds. For The World this is Yolande Knell in Luxor, Egypt.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

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This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN: I’m Marco Werman and this is the World.  What happened in Argentina from 1976 to 1983 was called The Dirty War.  But that’s a euphemism.  Here’s another one, The Disappeared.  That’s a mild way to describe the thirty thousand people who were killed in Argentina during The Dirty War.  One of them was Patricia Dixon.  She disappeared in 1977.  That same year, her friend, Juan Mandelbaum, left Argentina for the U.S.  Tonight, his documentary about Patricia and his friends from those years, will begin to air on the public television series, Independent Lens.  The film is called “Nuestros Disaparecidos”, “Our Disappeared”.  Juan Mandelbaum, first of all, when we talk about those who were “Disappeared” in this context, who are we actually talking about?

JUAN MANDELBAUM:  Well, these are mostly young activists, workers, students, people from all walks of life who were mostly on the Left and were seen by the military regime as dangerous and therefore they had to be not just captured and imprisoned, perhaps tried, none of that.  They had to be eliminated because this was a time when there was this fear of Communism that you know, there would be another Cuban Latin America so the military operated under this doctrine of national security where there were no limits to what they were capable of doing.

WERMAN:  And it was fairly limited in what the Junta was trying to do.  They basically rounded people up, they questioned them, they tried to get more names and then what happened?

MANDELBAUM:  Well, they would basically torture them, you know.  And most people could not withstand the torture, would give names of the people that they were supposed to meet next to then the military would go to that next meeting and capture those people.  Some people you know, would die under torture. The ones who survived were usually in very bad shape and then they would be eliminated by either being killed and thrown in mass graves or they had these infamous death flights where they would load them onto planes, strip them of their clothes and any identification and they would be drugged and then these planes would take off and fly over the river outside you know, Buenos Aires, go into the sea and throw them into the sea.

WERMAN:  So this is an especially dark period in Argentina’s history, in any history for that matter and yet you decided to throw yourself back into that dark period and find out what happened to this old girlfriend of yours.

MANDELBAUM:  Yeah, it wasn’t something I was planning on doing.  I mean it was something that was obviously in the back of my mind all these years, how terrible it was but it was kind of distant and then one night I was just doing a Google search of this old girlfriend that I had had, a girl from the university when I was studying sociology, Patricia, and I see her name on a list of people who disappeared.  Just the name and a date.  I thought maybe it’s somebody else and so I went back to Argentina, first just to find out and from there on, this amazing series of coincidences happened where I found her sister and her sister was almost like waiting for me to show up.  You know, she quotes this St. Augustine who says that the dead are you know, invisible, not absent and that’s the sense that I had throughout this that Patricia and the other people whose stories I tell, who were you know, people that I knew or the children of people that I knew, they were very present in some way and what was very beautiful is how they trusted me with their stories.

WERMAN:  Now Argentina has had a long history of military coups and paramilitary violence, but what happened on March 24, 1976 which kind of led to the “Disappeared” was different.  Let’s listen to this clip from your documentary:

MANDELBAUM:  The very same night as the coup, the Junta put into effect a secret plan to destroy all Leftist opposition forever.  Jorge Chinete, my colleague from the summer camp, was among the first to disappear.  Dragged from the school where he worked.  Was his work organizing the teachers where there was a sentence of death.  There were no charges.  There was no trial.

WERMAN:  So Juan Mandelbaum, your friend, Jorge Chinete, was a gym teacher, he was a counselor at this disadvantaged youth camp where you also worked, why would someone like him be a threat to the Junta?

MANDELBAUM:  He had been a union organizer, trying to organize the teachers and that was enough, you know, in their eyes.  Somebody who would be subversive and had to be taken out.  So you know, many people were in that category.  People who had a sense that we lived in an unfair society that had to be changed.  What we didn’t know at the time was that the military had lists and from that first night, they already started taking people away.

WERNER:  Including one extraordinary shocking episode in which this woman, Mini Vinas, actually runs from the secret police at a zoo and abandons her baby.  Tell that story, that’s just amazing.

MANDELBAUM:  Well Mini was another one of my colleagues in the summer camp and she had been deeply involved with the Montenedos which was one of these radical groups and she was at the zoo with her baby and sort of commiserating with other people about you know, their loved ones who had already been taken or killed and she sees the military coming towards her and at that moment, she drops her baby in the grass, Ynez was eight months old and walks towards her captors and she was never seen again.  The baby was picked up by a Swiss couple who saw this happening and they were just visiting Buenos Aires.  So they go to the police station and anyhow, this incredible saga begins at that moment that ends with her coming actually to the States as a little baby and growing up …

WERNER:  This is Ynez?

MANDELBAUM:  Yeah and growing up in Washington D.C. and it’s been one of the joys to meet he and to be able to share this story.

WERNER:  You said earlier that people you spoke with in Buenos Aires were incredibly open, almost like they were expecting you and wanting to tell this story.  Do you feel The Dirty War in Argentina has been adequately processed in a kind of national dialogue there?

MANDELBAUM:  No, not at all, not at all.  I mean there are still people who think that what the military did was right.  There are still people …

WERNER:  Many of them?

MANDELBAUM:  It’s very hard to tell the numbers.  I would say yes, there are many people and then there are people that weren’t affected personally who just say well, this was long ago, like let’s just move on because Argentina has one crisis after another.  There’s always some present crisis so people think that this, you can actually disregard it and move on and I don’t think you can do that.

WERNER:  Well how much do you think of all these crises that pop up in Argentina?  How much do you think progress is being impaired by the lack of a proper discussion and dissection of The Dirty War and all these Disappeared?

MANDELBAUM:  I think that it’s going to haunt Argentina always.  As it still haunts places like Spain today.  They’re still fighting about whether they should honor the mass graves from the civil war which ended in 1939 or you know, what happened in Armenia.  I mean these things don’t go away, the same way that the conflicts were involved with today in Iraq, in Afghanistan, you know, those are not going to go away.  There are so many people who are suffering from that whose memories are still going to be present many years from now and so I think that it is really imperative that Argentina address this in a comprehensive way and unfortunately, they’re still a very long ways to go you know, to get the people to justice and so there still is a deep division within the country and I think there’s a legacy of violence that still affects Argentina today.

WERNER:  Filmmaker Juan Mandelbaum.  The document is “Our Disappeared.”  It airs tonight on PBS.  Thank you very much for speaking with us.

MANDELBAUM:  Thank you very much for the opportunity.

WERNER:  For more information about “Our Disappeared,” come to our website, THEWORLD.ORG.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

• Watch the YouTube video
• New York Times article

A former stockroom clerk from the mountains of Tajikistan recently set off for the bright lights of Moscow after a video of him became an internet sensation.

He’s been dubbed Tajik Jimmy. And his claim to fame is singing and tapping out a popular disco-style Bollywood tune called Jimmy Jimmy Aaja. A guard at the store where Tajik Jimmy worked filmed him on his cell phone.

The guard sent the video to his brother in Moscow who posted it on You Tube. And well, you can guess the rest of the story….

The video became a smash hit. Tajik Jimmy has made the move from stockroom in Tajikistan to playing the Russian capital’s swanky nightclubs. That’s an unusual move considering anti-Tajik sentiment is strong in Russia.

But that hasn’t stopped Tajik Jimmy.

Word has it that he’s been offered a record deal.

CD Information
Original Release Date: May 19, 2009
Format: Explicit Lyrics
Label: 7 Grand Records
ASIN: B001QBC2Z8

Rex by José Manuel Prieto
Translated from Spanish by Esther Allen. Grove Press, 288 pages

Reviewed by Alexander Nemser

José Manuel Prieto’s “Rex” is an adventure through time: not historical time, or physical time, so much as literary time, the dreamy, static continuum of impressions and formulations recorded across centuries and civilizations. As the novel points out repeatedly, and even suspiciously, this is, at the same time, an adventure through timelessness, through the alluring eternal present of Literature as it exists alongside our time-bound passage through life.

Literature’s living presence is felt from the start to completely color, even to derange, the perceptions of the novel’s narrator, J., a defiantly bookish young man hired as a tutor for the son of a Russian family living in southern Spain. The family is apparently in possession of otherworldly wealth, and J. arrives with his imagination raised to a frantic height of daydreaming by his obsessive reading of Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time.”

The protagonist is almost immediately disappointed by the lack of taste, with the “whisper of surf barraging the coast” emerging from silver column-shaped speakers, and everything shining with a “doubloon glint.” J.’s ward, Petya, the addressee of the narrative, turns out to be a child with a mind distorted to idiocy by television like “a vinyl disc scratched by an oversize needle”; his every movements are followed by Batyk, the family’s mysterious “Filipino butler” who in fact displays all the qualities of a native of the Russian province of Buryatia; and he is completely unable to identify how Vasily Guennadovich, the father of the house, acquired his money, as much as he makes inquiries of Nelly, his dazzling wife who appears wearing necklaces surreally tinted diamonds, but never leaves the house.

As J. begins his lessons with Petya, based exclusively around commentaries on Proust’s novel, referred to by the Borgesian phrase “the Book” (“Everything is there in the Book, everything!”), the tutor finds himself embroiled in an elaborate conspiracy of sordid motives and ambiguous threats.

What follows is a fantastic plot involving a scheme to sell synthetic diamonds to a pair of cold-blooded Russian gangsters, the development of an anti-gravity machine, a platinum blonde who glows “like a creature from another world, from Epsilon Indi of the constellation of Tucana,” and another, even wilder scheme to orchestrate the resurrection and imposture of the Imperial House of Russia, with Vasily masquerading as the lost king, one of the multiple implications of the book’s title. But as the story develops, “Rex” is hijacked, for the better, by the Prieto’s considerable stylistic facility, and, further, by his ambitious and generous project of engagement with the history of literature.

Like Vladimir Nabokov, whose presence is never far from the author’s work (one of Prieto’s earlier novels, “Nocturnal Butterflies of the Russian Empire,” is a kind of book-length tribute to the Russian novelist), Prieto possesses a talent for description through surprising and extended flights of imagery, as when J. relates how he watched the beguiling Nelly go swimming wearing a necklace of incredible red and blue jewels: “I would follow her progress with the attention of a sentry watching a submarine’s red and blue navigation lights in the dark waters of an estuary.”

And when the two go on a romantic walk along the coast, he imagines the two of them like “a pair of assistant directors scouting along the edge of a steep cliff for the right location to film a scene of love and complicity against the wide-open sky.” Prieto’s images give the novel an alternately lyrical, hallucinatory, and ironic quality, both enriching and deflating J.’s account of the outrageous, at times to the point of being pulp, sequence of events.

José Manuel Prieto -- conversing with literary history

But Prieto’s main accomplishment is to have created a structure which so subtly and humorously enters into dialog with ideas of literary history: the way a new work is inextricably molded by its predecessors; the relentless drive of a work to outlast time and fortune; the fraudulence of commentary when faced with artistic greatness. The book constantly questions its own structure, doubts itself, and curls back around on its own premises: reviewing his own subject matter, J. asks, “Isn’t that enough for an original book, a straightforward book, written out point by point, without flashbacks or commentaries, should anyone, a primary writer, be disposed to do so?”

The text is punctuated throughout with fragments from Literature’s endless present, which appear in boldface, frequently without gloss, held up by J. as concentrations of wisdom, indictments of banality, even exact formulations of the phenomena he is recounting. In one funny moment, J., to prove the all-encompassing nature of Proust’s novel, demonstrates that even “The Matrix” was predicted by “the Book”: a description of “Saint-Loup’s two fists” wheeling in an “unstable constellation” of fists is shown to anticipate the scene in which a robotic agent catches up with Neo in a metro station and “launches a series of quick blows, a wheel of fists…like the blades of a windmill.”

Later in the novel, however, J. begins making much wider references to “the Book,” which turns out to contain not just Proust, but all of literature. And J.’s quotations from dozens of writers, from Herodotus to Shakespeare to Isaac Asimov, ultimately compose the very fabric of the novel. In this way, “Rex” ends up reading like a fanciful projection of what is to be found in between the lines of Literature itself, a reflection on the way in which literature and reality ceaselessly comment on each other, and an expression of mortal gratitude for the alternative Literature offers in the face of what is still unrealized.